Mobile computing on the Treo

This past weekend while at the National Cohousing Conference, Cat and I shared a bit of geekery and picked up a palmOne IR Wireless keyboard so that we could take notes in various panels right into our Treos. After installing the .PRC file into both units, the keyboard worked great, unfolding like some new-age Transformer into a nice perhaps 3/4 size keyboard, with a prop for the phone. Reassembling it was somewhat Rubiks-cube like, but it did fold down to a very comfortable package not much larger than the Treo itself.

We found it very useful to take fast notes into the Palm Memos function, and then upload them into email and other programs.

At one point I sat down at one of the tables, fired up upIRC, a very good IRC program for the Palm, and sat happily chatting with friends online over Verizon’s 1xRTT network. As a mobile IRC platform, with the addition of the keyboard, I find the whole setup pretty useable. It does get you some odd looks from passers by though. “He’s typing, but… he’s got a phone propped up. Suppose he’s typing on thephone? nahhhh.”

We were unfortunately in a very big hurry and had been hunting for Bluetooth keyboards that supported the Treo. Very few of them did, and they were all expensive. I ended up just going over to Office Depot or something like that, and they had them for about $69.
I think the Bluetooth problem was further evidence that the bluetooth stack in the Treo sucks. It can handle the ‘hands free’ profile, but anything beyond that is just outside it’s capacity. Sad.